SSD Install

Bought a new Samsung 840 250GB SSD for my 2010 MBP (5,4). Inserted the drive into a usb caddy, formatted it to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my current HDD to the SSD.
Rebooted the MBP with the SSD still in the USB caddy, held option key down and selected the USB drive. This booted into OSX and all looked good and was working as expected.
Shutdown the MBP, removed the old HDD and installed the SSD into its place, started up the mac - not booting, can't select the drive, just get a folder icon with a question mark.
Reset NVRAM/PRAM and SMC - still no joy
Reinstalled the old HDD - that boots fine. SSD in the USB caddy boots fine again as well...

Anyone have an idea on what could be the cause of this issue? Is it a case of my MBP wont support a SSD?

Don't see why it shouldn't work. I replaced the HD in my mid 2007 MBP with an SSD and it was fine. Is the partition table type GUID? I believe it must be this in order to be a boot drive. (for an Intel Mac)

Edited by TheHorseman (Sun 15-Sep-13 22:24:09)

I'll have a check, but surely it wouldn't boot from USB if it wasn't?

Just checked, it is definitely type GUID. Further research suggests possible SATA cable shielding fault or something to do with the SATA chipset (NVIDIA MCP79) not being very good for newer SSD's

Seems like further investigation shows that quite a few people have had this sort of issue when installing new HDD/SSD's in this model MBP (mine is actually mid 2009 not 2010). Most of the time, it has turned out to be the SATA cable that is the culprit, so I have ordered a new one of them. Now just need to wait for that to turn up and then test again...

Good luck, it was fairly straight forward on my MBP apart from needing to remove an amazing number of screws to access the HD.

If it's anything like my MacBook:

In reply to a post by TheHorseman:

Good luck, it was fairly straight forward on my MBP apart from needing to remove an amazing number of _{^{very small screws}} to access the HD.

Corrected that for you

Lol, so true

Just for a bit of closure on this while still waiting for a replacement SATA cable - put the SSD in the MBP again, booted off the CD and it sees the SSD. Installed OSX on there, works fine.
Tried booting the original HDD in my enclosure, won't be picked up, so I can only assume that the controller board in the enclosure isn't to friendly with this sort of procedure.
Acquired a HDD dock, put the HDD in there and the SSD inside the mbp, was able to boot from the external disk. Re-cloned it, reboot and all is now good fast
Now to cancel the cable order and sneakily return the dock

We've had to clone a few MBP HDD's to SDD's at work recently, and found the most reliable way of doing it (using CCC) was to put the new SDD inside the MBP, and put the HDD into an external caddy / dock.

Doing it the other way around quite frequently meant the when the SDD was put inside the MBP it wouldn't boot.

We always stick the SDD inside the MBP first now.